Hello andersonliddle, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Let's start this critique by looking at your arrows where you've done a really good job, your linework is very smooth and confident which helps give your arrows a great feeling of fluidity. You're making good use of the depth of the page with your application of foreshortening.

Your hatching is well applied, but make sure that it follows the principles of mark making and that your lines always have a clear start and end point, so draw your hatching lines going from one end of your arrow's width to the other, and make sure that it doesn't end or float in the middle of your arrows arbitrarily. As a finishing touch, don't forget to make use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.

In general your work here is really well made, so just remember to keep challenging yourself and exploring the different ways that arrows can twist and bend as they move through the world in order to keep developing your skills.

Leaves

Onto your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new structures. They have quite a good flow and energy to them, but don't forget to keep an eye out for unnatural bends as they're quite present in your page.

They happen because even though leaves are quite flexible along their spine, they're not as flexible across their width, if you try to bend the spine of a leaf on it's side, your leaf structure will break.

Your usage of edge detail is looking quite decently made, from what I can see you generally avoid trying to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks, you're also adding it in with the same general line thickness as the previous construction and putting it down on top of your original construction, instead of cutting back into the forms you've already drawn - all of which is good.

Your application of texture can be improved upon, as it doesn't follow the principles of texture introduced in Drawabox, instead you're focusing on capturing some very explicit texture, and you focus on what you think leaf texture looks like, instead of what it actually looks like, that stops you from carefully considering the cast shadows present in the surface of your leaf, and carefully designing each shadow shape in a way that effectively communicates to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands over that surface. Make sure to take a look over this informal demo on leaf texture as well as these reminders on texture in general.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they're coming along pretty decently as you're following the instructions for the exercise, which is helping you create some quite solid looking branches. Therr are some points where it seems you redrew some lines such as in [here](), so don't forget to execute your lines only once and with confidence.

When constructing any kind of cylindrical structure, make sure to treat your ellipse's outermost perimeter as the defining edge of the form, in order to avoid cutting back into your constructions accidentally.

You have a lot of visible tails in your branches, but that's not a really big deal as your accuracy will naturally improve with time, however there are some things we can do in order to mitigate this problem a little bit. Firstly make sure to add less ellipses to your branches, as this will allow for a greater length of runway between ellipses so that your lines can more seamlessly transition into each other. Secondly try to superimpose your new lines on top of the ones you've drawn previously, even if they run off from the intended path a little bit.

For your ellipses it's good to that you're making the effort to always draw through them twice. You also seem aware of the ellipse degree shift which helps you reinforce the illusion of tridimensionality and volume of your branches.

Plant Construction Section

Your plant constructions are coming along quite decently made, you're generally making use of the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson to great effect, they help you create much more solid and tridimensional looking structures, you're certainly demonstrating a strong developing sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

Of course, there's always a couple of things that we can improve upon, so here are some of the things you can do differently in order to take your work into the next level.

Firstly, make sure that you're never planning how many constructions you wish to fit on a given page before committing to any of them. Some of your constructions, such as your venus fly trap, doll's eye and fiddle head fern construction would have greatly benefited from being in pages by themselves, as this would have allowed you to make full use of the entire range of your arm more easily, and it would have given you more space to fully work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise as we tackle these exercises. So go into each page with the intention to make full use of it with a single construction, allow yourself all the space you need in order to draw comfortably and only after you're done should you gauge if there is enough space on the page to add one more construction, if there is, great, you should certainly add another construction, but if not, there's nothing wrong with having a single construction per page.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

• For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

• While this is something that you do generally respect we can see some spots on your Doll's eye as well as this wine cup where it looks like you're cutting back into the ellipses you've already drawn. If we take a look at a picture of a doll's eye we can see that the bulbs of this plant are all pretty ovoid in nature.

On top of this, for your wine cup construction you're not drawing the petals of the flowers with the leaf construction method which is a mistake that not only flattens your constructions, but stiffens it, as an ellipse is not able to capture the same fluidity that the leaf construction method provides.

So instead, make use of a boundary line, as shown in the hibiscus demo and then construct your flowers while abiding by it, in this manner you can maintain the way the petals are arranged and the fluidity of the petals.

For your Venus fly trap there are a couple of changes that you could have been made which would have allowed you to create a tighter and more specific structure.

Don't forget that when adding the "teeth" of the Venus fly trap as edge detail, that you're abiding by the same principles of edge detail, so don't leave any gaps in between your marks, make sure they each connect and that your lines are drawn in the same rich shade of black as the rest of your construction.

Currently you approached the "body" or the "stem" of the venus fly trap as a sort of leaf shape, while this is a valid way to approach this structure it makes the structure feel fragile and flimsy.

This part of the Venus Fly Trap is something that's called the petiole, it's cylindrical in nature, but it's hidden underneath the more leafy part of the stem, it's helpful to understand this because you can then simplify the forms by capturing this part of the structure as a cylinder ( and make it more clear how the "trap" of the venus flytrap connects to the rest of the structure ) and afterwards build the rest of the structure with the leaf construction method, which will allow for a structure that feels less flimsy and much more solid.

In these black bat flowers you haven't constructed the thin stem forms with the branch construction method, by drawing them as only single lines you don't capture any sense of volume and you make it harder for yourself to understand how these forms fully attach to the rest of the construction.

In these your wine cup constructiom you did not draw the plant pot in it's entirety, only the top part, make sure to always cap off cylindrical structures with an ellipse, never leave forms open ended.

How do we decide between shapes like sausage forms vs thick branches vs organic branches like mushrooms? I struggled to decide for forms like the cat tails

When it comes about deciding what to choose it depends on your needs and personal preference, there's more than one way you can approach a construction, and it's less about what method you use and more if you're able to apply it to the reference you're using in a way that allows you to draw a tridimensional looking structure.

However keep in mind that sausages are more organic shapes, branches can still be organic and can be changed in order to fit a variety of other structures, such as the body of a mushroom, sausages have a natural gesture that's more difficult to achieve with branches, and it's easier to construct new masses on top of them, branches are more solid and rigid.

When do we let texture convey shape or let forms define the shape? It seemed with all the roots and branches of the dragon tree on the last page, it might've been better to do a cone shape with the branches being conveyed through texture.

You're thinking of texture and construction as two different things, but in actuality they are the same concept, just in different scales. The construction aspect focuses on communicating to your viewer how they would manipulate this structure with their hands - if it's sturdy, if it's flexible, if it's thin, thick, if it's form is symmetrical or not, and so on, while texture focuses on visually communicating to your viewer what it would feel like to run their hands over the surface of that object - not all spheres are smooth metal, some are made out of dirty or uneven or so on.

Neither construction nor texture have anything to do with aesthetics or making a drawing visually interesting, what we draw here is based on what's physically present in our reference. As mentioned here when making use of texture, we should focus on how each individual form present on the surface of an object casts a shadow onto that same surface, and how that shadow would then be distorted by the surface it's being cast on. This means that the shape of this shadow is incredibly important as it defines the relationships between the form casting it and the surface it's being cast on, as such you should design your shadow shape in a way that feels dynamic, as shown here.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive, but in the long run this method of texture is the one that enforces the ideals of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following them, you'll find yourself asking how to convey texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing more on the implicit mark-making techniques introduced in Lesson 2.

You may have struggled with the dragon tree, but that's because in truth trees are a terrible structure to tackle in this lesson, due to their sheer size and complexity it's impossible to apply the construction methods and techniques to their full extent - for example in order to stick to the principles of this lesson, we'd have to construct each individual leaf structure on this tree, that's at least 3 lines for every leaf, multiplied by, at least 200,000 leaves, it's impossible to do this on an A4 page.

So because of the limitations of our medium, and because we want to complete this course before we're dead, avoid drawing trees.

Final Thoughts

In general your work is good, you're moving in the right direction. You're starting to understand the concepts this lesson seeks to teach, you're stumbling upon a couple of roadblocks which harm some of the solidity of your work and stop you from making the most out of this lesson, so you must keep them in mind and remember to avoid these mistakes in your next attempts.

I believe you're ready for the construction challenges in the next lesson, as such I'm going to mark this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.